Captain Melancholy and the Temporal Tourists

The Hedonistic Wanderer was humanity’s most pretentious achievement: a luxury cruise liner the size of Manhattan, carved from a single asteroid and polished to mirror-brightness, hurtling through the cosmos at 99.7% light speed with three thousand of Earth’s most insufferable socialites aboard. Captain Rodrigo Melancholy—yes, that was his actual name, and yes, his parents had been literature professors—stood at the observation deck watching space bend around them like a drunk accordion player’s fever dream.

“Capitán,” wheezed his first officer, Lieutenant Pamela Snodgrass-Worthington III, “the passengers are complaining again about the time dilation effects on their champagne bubbles.”

Melancholy sighed, a sound that somehow managed to convey both existential despair and mild indigestion. In the tradition of protagonists who’d rather be anywhere else in the universe, he contemplated the absurdity of his situation. Here he was, master of a vessel that could traverse galaxies, and his greatest concern was keeping rich people’s alcohol properly carbonated.

“What exactly is the nature of their complaint this time?” he asked, though he dreaded the answer.

“Well, sir, Mrs. Vanderbilt-Rothschild-Getty says her Dom Pérignon 2387 is aging backwards. She ordered it vintage, but now it’s apparently becoming younger than she is, which she finds ‘cosmically inappropriate.’”

Down in the Crystal Nebula Ballroom—a chamber so ostentatiously decorated it made Versailles look like a bus station restroom—the evening’s cocktail party was achieving levels of pretentiousness previously thought impossible by the laws of physics. The crème de la crème of Earth’s elite mingled beneath synthetic constellations, their conversations a symphony of name-dropping and humble-bragging that would have made Dante add another circle to hell.

Dr. Archibald Bombastic, heir to the Bombastic Fortune (built on patents for self-stirring coffee cups), was holding court near the quantum martini bar. “My dear Forsythia,” he proclaimed to anyone within earshot, which at light speed was everyone simultaneously and no one at all, “you simply must try this temporal gin. It’s distilled from juniper berries that haven’t been born yet!”

Forsythia Dimwittington, whose family had made their fortune in decorative space dust, tittered appropriately. “Oh Archie, you’re so droll! Though I must say, this whole time dilation business is terribly inconvenient. Do you know I sent a text message to my hairdresser on Alpha Centauri three hours ago, and by the time it arrives, I’ll already be dead of old age!”

The bartender, a philosophical android named Sartre-7 (programmed with an excessive appreciation for existential literature), mixed drinks with the precision of a Swiss chronometer and the weltschmerz of a German poet. Each cocktail was a meditation on the meaninglessness of existence, garnished with olives that questioned their own purpose.

“One Schrödinger’s Cosmopolitan,” announced Sartre-7, sliding the drink across the bar. “It’s simultaneously the best and worst drink you’ve ever had until you taste it, at which point it becomes definitively mediocre.”

That’s when things went magnificently, catastrophically wrong.

It started with Mrs. Prudence Higginbotham-Smythe’s request for “something with a little more temporal complexity.” Sartre-7, in a moment of either inspiration or malfunction, decided to blend a cocktail using ingredients from seven different time zones of the ship. The result was the Paradox Martini: a drink that existed in several temporal states simultaneously and tasted like tomorrow’s regrets mixed with yesterday’s ambitions.

The first sip created a localized time bubble around Mrs. Higginbotham-Smythe. She began aging backwards while moving forward through time, creating a recursive loop that made her simultaneously her own grandmother and great-granddaughter. Her conversation became increasingly nonsensical, though this went unnoticed at a party where nonsensical conversation was the norm.

“I was just telling myself about the time I will have been going to marry my future ex-husband’s past incarnation,” she announced, her words creating small temporal eddies in the air.

The effect spread. Lord Pemberton Snootworth, sampling the communal punch bowl that had been contaminated by temporal splash-back, found himself reliving the same anecdote about his yacht for what seemed like eternities. Each retelling became more elaborate and less true, until he was claiming to have sailed his yacht through the Magellan Clouds while being chased by time pirates.

Count Vladislav von Stuffington, a man so aristocratic his blood was technically classified as a rare mineral, discovered that his imported caviar from the Andromeda Galaxy was experiencing temporal flux. Each egg existed in a different century, creating a flavor profile that spanned millennia and tasted, according to his refined palate, “like the death of empires with a hint of lemon.”

Captain Melancholy received the emergency call just as the situation achieved true absurdity. Half the party was aging backwards, a quarter was stuck in temporal loops, and the remaining quarter was experiencing all possible conversations they could ever have simultaneously, creating a cacophony of overlapping small talk that threatened to collapse into a conversational black hole.

“Captain!” Lieutenant Snodgrass-Worthington’s voice crackled through the comm. “The passengers are experiencing what our temporal physicist describes as ‘a massive chronological clusterfuck of unprecedented proportions!’”

Racing to the ballroom, Melancholy encountered scenes that would have made Salvador Dalí reach for antacids. Dr. Bombastic was shaking hands with seventeen different versions of himself from various timelines, each trying to one-up the others about their respective achievements. Forsythia Dimwittington was having an animated conversation with her own future corpse about the proper way to arrange funeral flowers.

The piece de resistance was Mrs. Vanderbilt-Rothschild-Getty, who had become temporally unstuck and was now experiencing her entire life out of sequence. She was simultaneously being born, getting married, inheriting fortunes, and dying, all while complaining about the service.

“This is highly irregular!” she protested while being both an infant and a centenarian. “I demand to speak to the manager of causality!”

Sartre-7, the philosophical bartender, surveyed the chaos with mechanical satisfaction. “Ah,” he declared to no one in particular, “finally, a party that truly captures the human condition: confusion, repetition, and the desperate attempt to make meaning from meaninglessness, all while dressed in expensive clothes.”

Captain Melancholy stood in the doorway, watching three thousand of the galaxy’s wealthiest people experience the ultimate cosmic joke. Here they were, traveling faster than light to escape the mundane constraints of linear time, only to become trapped in a temporal cocktail party that would, quite literally, last forever.

He pulled out his emergency flask—filled with good old-fashioned Earth whiskey that existed in only one timeline and made no philosophical statements—and took a long drink.

“Lieutenant,” he said into his comm, “prepare a message to headquarters. Tell them we’ve successfully achieved our mission: we’ve given the rich an experience that money can’t buy. Unfortunately, they can’t leave.”

And in the background, the temporal mariachi band that had spontaneously manifested from the collective unconscious continued playing “Las Mañanitas” backwards in B-flat minor, while Count von Stuffington discovered that his temporal caviar had achieved sentience and was now critiquing his choice of crackers.

The Hedonistic Wanderer sailed on through the cosmos, carrying its cargo of chronologically confused aristocrats toward whatever destination awaited them—which, given their current state, was probably everywhere and nowhere at once.

After all, time is relative, but pretentious people are universal constants.